The gold standard of what a progressive ballot initiative campaign looks like ultimately didn’t turn out the way it was supposed to. In 2018, almost 65% of voters in Florida supported Amendment 4, which allowed convicted felons to vote once they served their time. The restriction on felon voting disproportionately hurt Black Floridians, with one in five of otherwise eligible Black voters in the state prevented from voting by the rule. But Amendment 4, the result of years of work by advocates and grassroots organizations, changed that.
“Florida rights restoration was 100% bottom-up,” said Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, the executive director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center. “The formerly incarcerated led the campaign, conceived of the campaign. From soup to nuts, Amendment 4 was so very much centered on formerly incarcerated folks and those who had lost the right to vote due to past convictions.”
BISC, a 501(c)(4) that has become the country’s premier progressive ballot initiative–focused organization, has been providing training and support for ballot measure campaigns for two decades. But recently, it has begun to shift its strategy to build more organizations and campaigns that are controlled by marginalized power, with the goal to give power to people of color and others who have traditionally been frozen out of the policymaking process.
“Racial equity is our North Star, and centering the people most impacted is very critical in how we have to approach the work,” said Figueredo. “I’m sure you’ve heard the people closest to the pain are also the closest to the solutions. And yet, we are never or rarely included in the initial conversations or given a seat at the table for any policy discussion.”
Why ballot initiatives can be so powerful
Ballot initiatives are supposed to be the most small-d democratic part of governance, allowing a state’s voters to weigh in on issues directly. For progressives, these initiatives have been an end run around GOP-dominated legislatures to enact broadly popular policies. Cannabis legalization advocates have used this tactic repeatedly; it worked in Florida on Amendment 4, and it allowed advocates in Missouri to pass Medicaid expansion in 2018.
In 2020, ballot initiatives were a mixed bag at best for progressives. Floridians passed a $15 minimum wage even while delivering the state to President Donald Trump, and also defeated an amendment that would have limited the power of ballot measures. Voters in several states approved recreational cannabis laws. But elsewhere, the news was grim: Californians rejected an affirmative action ballot measure, as well as efforts to expand rent control; they also gave “gig economy” companies like Lyft and Uber the ability to continue treating their workers as contract employees. And while voters in Colorado blocked an attempt to limit abortion access, Louisiana voters approved an anti-abortion constitutional amendment in a landslide.
These results may help explain BISC wants to do more than just get measures passed—it wants to build coalitions and give more power to marginalized people so that they can run campaigns year in and year out. The organization cites polling showing that 63% of voters of color (and 69% of young Black voters) thought that voting for ballot measures was more effective than voting for candidates.
For years, the organizations that have pushed for ballot measures were, like much of the progressive movement, led by white people, often white men. “Growing up in progressive politics, I was often the only woman, or certainly the only Latina in a lot of rooms,” said Figueredo, who is the first queer woman of color to lead BISC.
“Over the last several years, really starting in 2014, there has been sort of this shift to more grassroots, people-of-color-led organizations being much more heavily involved in the ballot measure process,” Figueredo said. One result of this is that there has been an increased emphasis on initiatives that seek to reverse the effects of systemic racism.
That means a lot of measures aimed at reforming the criminal justice system, which disproportionately harms the lives of people of color who get swept up in it. It also means removing impediments to voting erected by conservatives that tend to restrict ballot access for poor people and people of color. Of the measures in 2020 that BISC tracked, there were 37 related to “criminal justice” or “democracy reform,” far more than any other category save “revenue,” a routine subject of ballot measures. That speaks to where the enthusiasm and energy is right now.
Campaigning beyond election day
The major problem with ballot initiatives is typified by what happened after Amendment 4 was passed. The Republicans who controlled Florida’s legislature enacted a law requiring felons to pay all the fines and fees associated with their crime before being able to vote, a stipulation that effectively reversed the will of the voters. Many felons couldn’t afford to pay these bills; in some cases, there wasn’t even a clear way for them to find out what they owed.
There are many ways for hostile legislators to respond to ballot measures they don’t like. The simplest method is to pass a law invalidating the measure, a technique that the GOP used in Florida (Amendment 4 changed the state constitution, but lawmakers still figured out a way to weaken it to the point of impotency). They can also work to make it harder to pass ballot measures in the future, which Florida conservatives are also doing—a measure on the ballot would have required state voters to approve amendments in two consecutive elections, making future changes to the constitution all but impossible. (It lost narrowly.) More conventional methods of slowing down ballot measure campaigns include raising the threshold for signatures required for ballot access and requiring a supermajority of voters to approve amendments.
This is why BISC has been moving away from merely trying to get ballot measures passed, which Figueredo derisively referred to as the “50% plus 1” model.
“It’s not simply about winning the measure itself; it’s how we’re building lasting durable power and increasing capacity in communities and in community-based organizations that are going to be there beyond any election or any campaign,” she said.
On a practical level, it means training activists of color and providing them with assistance. It means prioritizing measures that bubble up from the grassroots. And it means developing a real infrastructure across states. Ballot measure campaigns are now potentially years-long conflicts between advocacy groups and hostile legislators, and groups need to prepare for the long haul.
“Election day is not the goalpost,” said Figueredo. It’s a moment on the field of the work.”
